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Selected Development Project
 
Project Title

Linguistic Analysis of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese by Constructing an Annotated Spoken Corpus

二十世紀中葉香港粵語的語料庫建構及研究
 
Principal Investigator Dr CHIN Chi On
 
Area of Research Project
Language, Literature and Linguistics
 
Project Period
From 01/2013 To 11/2015
Objectives
  • To construct a language database of mid-20th century Hong Kong Cantonese with authentic spoken data drawn from Cantonese movies (粵語長片) produced during 1950 and 1970;
  • To provide a new set of authentic spoken data for studying the Cantonese language at the levels of lexicon, syntax, semantics and discourse;   
  • To investigate the development of the Cantonese language over the past six decades 
Methods Used
  • Collection of authentic spoken data from selected Cantonese movies produced between 1950 and 1970;
  • Transcription of the movie dialogs by annotating the video resource;
  • Development of an online search engine with the transcribed data
Summary of Findings
  • Linguistic features characterizing mid-20th century Hong Kong Cantonese;
  • Possible accounts for the differences and changes of the Cantonese language;
  • Inter-relationship between society, culture and language
Impact
  • Provision of a new set of rich authentic spoken data for Cantonese linguistics research;
  • Exploration of linguistic changes in Hong Kong Cantonese over the past 60 years;
  • Understanding the inter-relationship between language, society and culture of mid-20th century Hong Kong.
Output
  • Chin, Andy Chi-on. (2013). “New language resources for Cantonese linguistics research”. Paper presented at the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium 2013 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, Kyoto, December 10 - 11 2013;
  • 錢志安, 黎奕葆（2014，11）：粵語動詞的後「?」，《海外珍藏漢語文獻與南方明清漢語研究研討會》論文，廣州。
  • 謝明燊, 錢志安（2015，4）：粵語「名-量-名」結構的同指用法，《第十五屆粵語討論會》論文，香港。
  • 錢志安（2015，5）：粵語(四字)歇後語的修辭手法，《中國南方語言四音節慣用語研討會》論文，香港。
Biography of Principal Investigator

Dr. Andy Chin is Associate Professor of Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies. He has a wide range of interests in linguistics research, including linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and Chinese linguistics. He has secured different types of (research) projects supported by General Research Fund, Early Career Scheme, Knowledge Transfer Fund, Central Research Scheme and Teaching Development Grants.

More information about Dr. Chin can be obtained from his homepage at http://www.hkseattle.com.
Funding Source

Early Career Scheme